Nvidia: we are building custom ARM-based CPU cores

Nvidia has announced that it plans to build high-performance ARM-based CPU cores for products ranging from personal computers and servers to workstations and supercomputers. In other words, you'll soon see an Nvidia CPU running the ARM instruction set that is fully integrated on the same chip as the Nvidia GPU.

Nvidia obtained rights to develop its own high performance CPU cores based on ARM's future processor architecture and licensed ARM's current Cortex-A15 processor for its future-generation Tegra mobile processors. The news is hot on the heels of Microsoft's announcement that Windows 8 will support the ARM architecture. That announcement specifically mentions three ARM partners: Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, and the newly added Nvidia.

"ARM is the fastest-growing CPU architecture in history," Jen-Hsun Huang, president and chief executive officer of Nvidia, said in a statement. "This marks the beginning of the Internet Everywhere era, where every device provides instant access to the Internet, using advanced CPU cores and rich operating systems. ARM's pervasiveness and open business model make it the perfect architecture for this new era. With Project Denver, we are designing a high-performing ARM CPU core in combination with our massively parallel GPU cores to create a new class of processor."